Search form

Latest News

Ditsong: Museums of South Africa will host a dialogue on Xenophobia in South Africa to create an awareness of the impact of Xenophobia. The objectives of the public lecture are to create an awareness of the effects of xenophobia, to create an Africa that is unified and free of hatred.

The Department of Arts and Culture has been supporting the LETPC since its inception in 2015. The first event was inaugurated by the Minister of Arts and Culture Honourable Nathi Mthethwa. The Department has extended further commitment by providing additional two years support from 2019 to 2021.

The ArtbankSA, a national programme of the Department of Arts and Culture (DAC), is issuing a call to South African artists to apply for their contemporary artwork acquisition. The ArtbankSA is part of the Mzansi Golden Economy (MGE) strategy implementation and is hosted by the National Museum Bloemfontein, an agency of the Department of Arts and Culture. The programme annually considers acquiring special pieces of art for its own growing permanent collection.

The second weekend of May 2019 marks the opening of the Venice Biennale, when the world’s art cognoscenti descend on the Italian city for the industry’s oldest art biennale – and definitely the one to be at.

South Africa’s arts and culture are as varied as one might expect from such a diverse nation. The blend of local cultures and diverse influences make for a melting pot of creativity that never disappoints.

As custodians of South Africa’s diverse cultural, artistic and linguistic heritage, the Department of Arts and Culture aims to develop and preserve South African culture to ensure social cohesion and nation-building.

South Africa’s cultural and creative industry is a good revenue generator, and still has great potential to produce more and contribute to job creation.

The Cultural Industries Growth Strategy capitalises on the economic potential of the craft, music, film, publishing and design industries.

The Department of Arts and Culture provides support in the form of financing, management capacity, advocacy and networking, and by developing public-private partnerships and other initiatives that use culture as a tool for urban regeneration.

The Department has entered into partnerships with significant stakeholders to map the cultural industries.

Cabinet has identified the creative and cultural industries as one of the drivers of economic growth and job creation in the implementation of the New Growth Path.

The Industrial Policy Action Plan 2 identifies the cultural industries, in particular the craft sector, music, jewellery production, clothing, leather, footwear and textiles as some of the sectors that will be subjected to focused and significant support by the State.

Social Cohesion and Nation-Building
Defining social cohesion
The department defines social cohesion as the degree of social integration and inclusion in communities and society at large, and the extent to which mutual solidarity finds expression among individuals and communities.

In terms of this definition, a community or society is cohesive to the extent that the inequalities, exclusions and disparities based on ethnicity, gender, class, nationality, age, disability or any other distinctions which engender divisions distrust and conflict are reduced and/or eliminated in a planned and sustained manner - this with community members and citizens as active participants, working together for the attainment of shared goals, designed and agreed upon to improve the living conditions for all.

Defining Nation-Building
Nation-building is the process whereby a society with diverse origins, histories, languages, cultures and religions come together within the boundaries of a sovereign state with a unified constitutional and legal dispensation, a national public education system, an integrated national economy, shared symbols and values, as equals, to work towards eradicating the divisions and injustices of the past; to foster unity; and promote a countrywide conscious sense of being proudly South African, committed to the country and open to the continent and the world.

Nation-building in this sense, and in the context of South Africa, cannot be the perpetuation of hierarchies of the past, based on pre-given or ethnically engineered and imposed divisions of people rooted in prejudice, discrimination and exclusion. It calls for something else; that is, a rethinking, in South African terms, of what social cohesion, linked to nation-building, should be. It should, no doubt and in essence, be directed towards the practical actualisation of democracy in South Africa.

Accordingly, a nation is conceived as a social formation based on the unity and equality of its members consisting of the following shared and recognised attributes: